1 The author is indebted to Steffen Ducheyne and an anonymous referee for their suggestions. Philosophica 76 (2005) pp. 67-90 WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OF DESCARTES’S MEDITATION SIX? 1 Catherine Wilson ABSTRACT In this essay, I argue that Descartes considered his theory that the body is an innervated machine – in which the soul is situated – to be his most original contribution to philosophy. His ambition to prove the immortality of the soul was very poorly realized, a predictable outcome, insofar as his aims were ethical, not theological. His dualism accordingly requires reassessment. I One way to read Descartes’s Meditations is this: Descartes was concerned to prove the existence of God and of a soul distinct from the body and capable of surviving it. To that end, he provided four different arguments for the existence of God in Meditations Three and Five, and arguments first for the conceptual and then for the actual independence of mind and body at the start of Meditation Six. The remainder of Meditation Six, on this reading, is noise – a basically irrelevant discussion of physiology, similar to the other basically irrelevant discussion of the heart in the Discourse on Method.Its gratuitous detail was occasioned on this view by Descartes’s realization that, having perfectly distinguished the soul from the body, he would be faced with objections from critics wanting to know how two separate, ontologically distinct substances could causally interact. Descartes never manages to
Transcript
1 The author is indebted to Steffen Ducheyne and an anonymous referee for their
suggestions.
Philosophica 76 (2005) pp. 67-90
WHAT IS THE IMPORTANCE OFDESCARTES’S MEDITATION SIX?1
Catherine Wilson
ABSTRACT
In this essay, I argue that Descartes considered his theory that the body is an innervated
machine – in which the soul is situated – to be his most original contribution to philosophy.
His ambition to prove the immortality of the soul was very poorly realized, a predictable
outcome, insofar as his aim s were ethical, not theological. His dualism accordingly requires
reassessment.
I
One way to read Descartes’s Meditations is this: Descartes wasconcerned to prove the existence of God and of a soul distinct from thebody and capable of surviving it. To that end, he provided four differentarguments for the existence of God in Meditations Three and Five, andarguments first for the conceptual and then for the actual independenceof mind and body at the start of Meditation Six. The remainder ofMeditation Six, on this reading, is noise – a basically irrelevantdiscussion of physiology, similar to the other basically irrelevantdiscussion of the heart in the Discourse on Method.Its gratuitous detailwas occasioned on this view by Descartes’s realization that, havingperfectly distinguished the soul from the body, he would be faced withobjections from critics wanting to know how two separate, ontologicallydistinct substances could causally interact. Descartes never manages to
CATHERINE WILSON68
2 Bitbol-Hesperies, 1999: 372.
3 Wilson, 2000.
answer them and Meditation Six offers only a disappointingly negativethesis: mind and body are not related as a pilot to his ship.
Here are some reasons to think this can’t be the right interpretationof Meditation Six, or indeed of the Meditations taken as a whole. First,this interpretation of the role of the discussion of the nerves and brainsheds no light on the comparably long discussion of the heart at the endof the Discourse. Second, it sheds no light on the place of theMeditations in Descartes’s oeuvre: the surprising occurrence of ametaphysico-theological work after a set of publications (and suppressedpublications) in natural philosophy dealing with topics from cosmologyand meteorology to the physiology of vision. As Anne Bitbol-Hesperiesobserves, “It was Cartesian anthropology, grounded in a mechanisticdefinition of life, that gave rise to reactions among the first readers.”2
Some of Descartes’s closest friends, like Henry Regius, wondered whathe had in mind with this new, metaphysical style of publication.3 Third,the Meditations are a short, but architectonically complex text withscarcely a superfluous line in them, at least up through the first half ofMeditations Six. How likely is it that Descartes lost control of hismaterial just at the end? Fourth, Descartes’s claim in his Preface that hispurpose in writing the Meditations was to prove the immortality of thesoul by philosophical means does not match up with his text. As virtuallyevery 17th century critic of the text pointed out, Descartes failed to draw asingle inference about the immortality of the soul in the Meditations, andthis distinguished him markedly from the run of 17th centurymetaphysicians. But if Descartes thereby revealed that he did not carevery much about the immortality of the soul, what did he care about?Some commentators have acknowledged Descartes’s empirical interestsand have made a gesture towards acknowledging the importance of thephysiology of Meditation Six by arguing as follows: Descartes valuedmathematical physics, which deals with extension and motion, over theBaconian sciences that employ our sense to study qualitativelydifferentiated things. Meditation Six shows why the senses are conduciveto the preservation of life and health in us and in the animals but have no
MEDITATION SIX 69
4 Hatfield, 1986: 61; see a lso Garber, 2001.
5 See esp. von Staden, 2000.
6 NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: “AT” refers to Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (eds.)
(1964), Oeuvres de Descartes. Paris, Vrin; “CSMK” refers to John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothof, Dugald Murdoch, and A. Kenny (eds.) (1985-1991), The
Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I-III, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
epistemological value.4 If the lesson to be taken away from theMeditations is, however, that science is best approached by abstractionfrom experience, why didn’t Descartes just say so, or give someexamples from mechanics?
In light of these interpretive difficulties, the following hypothesisis worth a trial: The climax of the Meditations is the account of thehuman being as an innervated fleshly structure linked to the world ofmaterial objects in an adaptive and functional way. It was this theory ofthe human body in the world, drawing on the basic concepts ofAlexandrian experimental physiology,5 that Descartes considered to behis special, original contribution to philosophy. The Meditations isaccordingly a work of psycho-physiological theodicy, in which the minddiscovers its own competency and then goes on to discover thecompetency of its own body. Descartes uses the leverage of theAugustinian-Platonic tradition of incorporealism to overthrow somecentral theological doctrines: that sin is intrinsic to human nature, thatthe body is basically an encumbrance to the ideal form of human life, andthat death will liberate the human soul for a magnificent intellectualfuture. The existence of errors - epistemological, perceptual, and, byimplication, moral - is explained in a way consistent with the thesis thatthe body is an optimized machine. The Fall of Man is, by implication, amyth. This has implications for ethics. Meditation Six thus supplies thegroundwork for the Passions of the Soul, with the study of moralityrepresenting, according to Descartes, the “ultimate level of wisdom” andrequiring “a complete knowledge of the other sciences,” especiallymedicine and mechanics (AT6 IXB: 14).
How is this accomplished? Descartes first discovers in MeditationFour that the human mind is not a defective instrument. Then he finds in
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7 See Descartes’s qualified commendation of Epicurean tranquility to the Princess
Elizabeth in the Letter to Elizabeth, 18 August, 1645 (AT IV: 275ff, CSMK III:
261, as well as the final chapter of Boros, 2001).
Meditation Six that the human mind usually needs a body to think andalways needs a body to experience. Then he establishes that the body isnot a defective instrument either. There is nothing in our constitutionsthat does not “bear witness to the power and goodness of God.” (AT VII:87-8). However, the bodily machine must operate, as a clock does,according to certain laws of nature that cannot be suspended or adjusted.The operation of any machine is constrained by certain features of thecorporeal world, including the tendency for its parts to wear out, gettangled, develop obstructions, and for the whole to run out of fuel. Theneed for physical connectors between the distal parts of the body and thatpart of the brain that is in direct communication with the mind leavesliving thinking machines vulnerable to both error and misfortune. Itfollows that the passions suffered by the soul are no more harmful assuch than other experiences, though some are disagreeable and dangerousto others. With further investigation, we cancome to an understanding ofthe underlying mechanisms involved and intervene to make adjustments,wherever our weaknesses cause excessive trouble and grief—or perhapsaccept their inevitability, it being understood that God is the source ofthis inevitability.7
This ethical doctrine, only superficially allied with Stoicism, isfounded in the functional theory of the passions. It even has room forDescartes’s unusual antistoical defence of “even disordered love” in a1647 Letter to Chanut. (AT IV: 614). Morality, in Descartes’s view, nomore requires repression of the passions generally than health requiresrepression of the vital functions generally. Descartes, in other words,considers the experiences - sensations, conscious perceptions, andemotions - of living embodied human beings to be of capital importance.The doctrines of Mediation Six leave it unclear whether disembodiedsensory experiences on the part of persons who have died and whosebrains accordingly no longer work--even if such experiences are logicallypossible--are consistent with God’s goodness and providence. Theycertainly would not, unlike our ordinary experiences, manifest God’sgoodness and providence.
MEDITATION SIX 71
But how could these results be consistent with Descartes’s statedintention to prove the immortality of the soul? For it would be absurd toclaim that Descartes was committed to, or anywhere asserts, or couldhave agreed to the mortalist proposition that the human soul ceases toexist with the death of the human body. He most certainly was notcommitted to that proposition and would not have asserted it even if hehad believed it. Cartesian arguments were routinely cited after his deathas exemplary proofs for the incorporeality and immortality of the soul.Nevertheless, their popularity had faded considerably be the end of the17th century. Moreover, there is a sense in which the fate of the soul afterdeath was an eventuality Descartes did not care about and did not thinkrelevant to the establishment of a practical philosophy. In this respect, hediffered from Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Kant, each of whom wasunconvinced by dualism, though each took the question of immortalityvery seriously indeed and considered it to be of central ethicalimportance.
II
In the Principles of Philosophy, published three years after theMeditations, Descartes offered an account of the self-formation of theworld indebted to Lucretius’s Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura. Theheavens, and plants and animals, come to be from “a chaos as confusedand muddled as any the poets could describe” (AT IXB: 34) merely byGod’s establishing laws and setting matter in motion. Pretending to beadvancing a fiction, Descartes described the formation of our vortex, thatis, our planetary system, by chance, claiming that, by the operation of thelaws of nature, “matter must successively assume all the forms of whichit is capable […]” He explained how, from an initial isotropicdistribution of particles of matter of equal size, all the features of what hecalled the visible world, would eventually emerge (AT IXB: 99ff). Allvisible form is a result of the congregation of particles. Descartesdispensed not only with the direct creative action of God but with theformative forces of Renaissance natural philosophy. There is nodifference in principle between the generation of inanimate patternedobjects, whether vortices or snowflakes, and the generation of animatepatterned objects. The baby is mechanically formed in the womb from a
CATHERINE WILSON72
8 Mortalism, as it appeared to 17 th-century philosophers, came in two main
versions. The first was represented in Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de imm ortalitate
animae of 1516, which was placed on the Index. This Averroist treatise
interpreted Aristotle as denying personal immortality and maintaining that the
human soul was absorbed into the Active Intellect after death. Something of us
lives on and perhaps continues to think, though it is difficult to say exactly what,
and, since personal identity is obliterated, divine retribution and reward for the
conduct of life are precluded . The second version, derived from the materialists
Epicurus and Lucretius, was harsher in posting total annihilation of the mind and
dispersal of its soul-atoms after the death of the body. It was well represented in
the libertine culture of early 17th century Paris; see, for example, the texts of
Théophile de Viau and Jacques Vallée des Barreaux in Adam, 1964.
mixture of seminal fluids (AT II: 525).The animal-machine that results iscapable of all the manifestations of life, including warmth, movement,communication, and reactivity (AT XI: 201-2).
The possibility of natural formation inevitably suggested thenecessity of natural dissolution. Descartes officially rejected theEpicurean conclusion that every object is susceptible of dissolution andthat nothing lasts except the totality of particles of which the universe ismade. According to the Meditations, the human soul is potentially atleast, an exception to the doctrine of universal dissolution. But didDescartes provide any clear and convincing arguments for personalimmortality? In his prefatory Letter to the Sorbonne giving his rationalefor writing and publishing his Meditations, he observed that "[S]ome[people] have even had the audacity to assert that, as far as humanreasoning goes, there are persuasive grounds for holding that the souldies along with the body […] But in its eighth session the LateranCouncil held under Leo X condemned those who take this position, andexpressly enjoined Christian philosophers to refute their arguments anduse all their powers to establish the truth; so I have not hesitated toattempt this task as well." (AT VII: 3).8 He assured the reader that:
I have a lways thought that two topics - namely God and the soul -
are prime examples of subjects where demonstrative proofs ought
to be given with the aid of philosophy rather than theology. For us
who are believers, it is enough to accept on faith that the human
soul does not die with the body, and that God exists; but in the case
of unbelievers, it seems that there is no religion, and practically no
MEDITATION SIX 73
9 The three arguments are: a) if the Meditator had derived his existence from
himself, he would be God and not as imperfect as he in fact is; b) the Meditator
does not have the power to maintain himself in existence, though he does in fact
seem to remain in existence; and c) the idea of God within this (existing,
persisting) thing could only have been caused by (a real) God. Meditation Five
develops the Meditation Three point that “nothing more perfect than God, or
even as perfect, can be thought of or imagined” into Descartes’s version of the
Ontological Argument.
moral virtue, that they can be persuaded to adopt until these two
truths are proved to them by natural reason. (AT VII: 1-2)
Where demonstrating the existence of God was concerned, onecan't say Descartes didn’t try. He offered three arguments in MeditationThree intended to exclude the possibility that “God” names a mere ideaconcocted by the brain of a perishable body by showing that the thingthat has ideas depends critically on God.9 (These are somewhat awkwardarguments: one of them mentions his “parents”, but since at this stage hedoubts everything possible; the Meditator doesn't know that he hasparents, only that he seems to have parents.) Then he returned to try toprove the existence of God more directly from the concept of God inMeditation Five, once the reliability of his intellect had been established.But with immortality, as one of the Objectors points out, Descartes didn’teven try. Thus Mersenne:
You say not one word about the immortality of the human mind.
Yet this is something you should have taken special care to prove
and demonstrate, to counter those people, themselves unworthy of
immortality, who utterly deny and even perhaps despise it, […] It
does not seem to follow from the fact that the mind is distinct from
the body that it is incorruptib le or immortal. What if its nature were
limited by the duration of the life of the body, and God had
endowed it with just so much strength and existence as to ensure
that it came to an end with the death of the body? (AT VII: 127-8)
Arnauld, too, observed that there was no proof of the immortality of thesoul, as opposed to its distinctness from the body, in Meditation Six:
CATHERINE WILSON74
[S]ince our distinguished author has undertaken to demonstrate the
immortality of the soul, it may rightly be asked whether this
evidently follows from the fact that the soul is distinct from the
body. According to the principles of commonly accepted
philosophy this by no means follows, since people ordinarily take it
that the souls of brute animals are distinct from their bodies, but
nevertheless perish along with them. (AT VII: 204-205)
Mortality was very much on the mind of all the Objectors. ThusGassendi:
You can exist apart from your solid body – just as the vapour with
its distinctive smell can exist [outside] the apple. […] Indeed
supposing you are some corporeal or tenuous substance, you would
not be said to vanish wholly at your death or to pass into
nothingness; you would be said to subsist by means of your
dispersed parts. We would, however, have to say that, because of
this dispersal, you would not continue to think, or be a thinking
thing, a mind or a soul. (AT VII: 342-43)
The 6th set of Objectors reminded Descartes that:
Ecclesiastes says that “a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast”
and that there is no one who knows “whether it goeth upward” (i.e.
whether it is immortal) or whether, with the spirits of the bests, it
“goeth downward” (i.e. perishes). (AT VII: 416)
III
At the start of Mediation Six, the Meditator still thinks it possible that heis a mind without a real body and that there are no corporeal things.Examining his reasoning processes about mathematical objects, he foundearlier that they produce excellent results, even if there are nomathematical objects, not really. We can know truths about the true andimmutable nature of the triangle, even if there are no extra-mentaltriangles. The Meditator can even prove the existence of God fromreflection on the concept of God - though the trouble with the argumentis that it works even if there is no God. His excellent facility withdeductive reasoning in geometry implied the existence of a body closely
MEDITATION SIX 75
10 Cf. Descartes, Optics, Discourse Six, AT VI: 141: “[I]t is the soul which sees,
and not the eye, and it does not see directly, but only by means of the brain.”
related to his mind (AT VII: 73; cf. Treatise on Man AT XI: 143, 176).When it understands, Descartes says, the mind turns towards itself. Whenit imagines, as it does in geometry, the mind “turns towards the body andlooks at something in the body which conforms to an idea understood bythe mind or perceived by the senses” (AT VII: 73).10
So, while I can do geometry whether or not triangles actually exist,as opposed to possessing true and immutable natures, it seems that Icould not do geometry without my body. For, if I were a whollyincorporeal being, although I could understand ideas, I could not perceiveor imagine the figures - the triangles, circles, and lines needed toconstruct proofs. Clearly, then, if we can acquire knowledge of physics,astronomy and medicine, we will need our bodies to do so. Some aspectsof these sciences depend on the perception of material objects such aspendulums, billiard balls, planets, stars, and internal organs, and if weneed our brains to visualize, assuredly we need our brains to see. Thebody provides content for the mind to work on.
The demon argument of Meditation Two presented the claim thatsomething can be imagined as a disembodied mind and as having normalhuman experiences - all the kinds of experience we normally have in thecourse of a day or week: perceptions of solid, coloured objects, painfuland pleasant sensations, odd dreams, fleeting or fixed emotions, visualmemories and anticipations. This claim was never explicitly retracted inthe course of the Meditations. Nevertheless, from a logical point of view,the assumption was discharged in Descartes’s reductio ad absurdum ofthe Evil Genius hypothesis.
For, God is perfect - God does not deceive - perceptual experiencewould be deceptive if caused by something other than corporealsubstance. Since a perfect God and not a Demon exists, disembodiednormal human experience that deceptively seems to depend on causalinteraction with corporeal things is not possible for us. The Meditatorrealised that his sensory imagination was not essential to him, as hiscapacity for nonimagistic pure understanding was (AT VII: 73), and thatsensory perception must be inessential as well. Yet Meditation Six flatlycontradicts the supposition that God has made minds that express only
CATHERINE WILSON76
the essence of the human mind and that also have normal humanexperiences.
But couldn’t God have made minds that did not need to turntowards something outside them in order to have experiences? Can’t weimagine a pure incorporeal mind that, instead of being causally related to,or having its states correlated with, states of the brain, has them causallyrelated to, or correlated with certain states of the world?
We don't know why God didn’t arrange things in this way in thefirst place. To be sure, such a system of “direct perception” would notgive us any obvious means to remember or imagine, since there would beno obvious candidate for the generator of the object the mind turns towhen remembering and imagining, the world itself being in a differentstate. All we know is that God is good and uses brains for perception,emotion, and sensation, as well as memory and imagination. And ifbrains - and the system of automatic movements they mediate - came toexist “by nature” by slow, law-governed processes, which, having beeninstituted by God, are good, it’s easily conceivable that God found itsimple and elegant when creating humans to adjoin experiences to brainstates rather than to world states.
But isn’t the soul, one might wonder, a thing that, right to the endof the Meditations, “doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is unwilling, isunwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions” (AT VII:28)?No: the Meditator discovers in Meditation Six that the soul doesn’tdo all these things unaided. The body is necessary, though not of coursesufficient, for imagination and sensory experience. The position ofMeditation Six is consistent with Descartes’s reply to Henry More’squestion in 1649 whether angels have sense perception and are corporeal.
The human mind separated from the body does not have sense-
percep tion strictly so-called; but it is not clear by natural reason
alone whether angels are created like minds distinct from bodies,
or like minds united to bodies. I never decide about questions on
which I have no certain reasons, and I never allow room for
conjectures. (AT V: 402)
Note that Descartes did not, in this context, take the MeditationTwo position that sense perception does not imply the presence of abody. He rather suggested that if angels perceive it is because they are“like” minds united to bodies, even if they are incorporeal.
MEDITATION SIX 77
11 Descartes claims that the permanence of corporeal substance and the
Resurrection of the body are matters of faith (AT V: 53).
12 The letter of condolence to Huygens of 1642 (AT III: 598) might be taken as
suggesting that Descartes believed that our intellectual memory will persist and
will enable us to remember the past and recognize our relatives. The passage is
hard to reconcile with the claim (AT IV: 114) that the memory of material things
(including the appearance of persons) depends on traces in the brain and memory
of intellectual things on traces in the mind. I am indebted to Kurt Smith for
pointing this out.
But what about after death? God, or an angel, could supplynonessential content to the mind after the death of the body, enabling usto continue to remember, feel, imagine, and do geometry after our bodiescrumble away. God could revive us from death as disembodiedexperiencers, with imaginary bodies for that matter, ensuring that weunderstood clearly and distinctly that our bodies were unreal, removingthe demonic, deceptive features of disembodied experience. But onlyfaith and not philosophy, which draws conclusions on the basis of clearand distinct ideas and their entailments, gives us any reason to think thatwe will be given new bodies in order to have experiences, or will makedo with imaginary bodies or no bodies at all.11 If the argument of theMeditations can be said to reveal an assurance by God that we are nowembodied perceivers and that there is no Demon, it is powerless to revealan assurance by God that after death we will continue to experience andthat there will still be no Demon. Absent this assurance, it is possiblethat, in a post-mortem existence, a self would neither remember events,objects, and former passions, nor have new experiences, nor be able toreason geometrically. The self would still think, for Descartesacknowledges the possibility of non-imagistic thinking, but it would benothing like the kind of thinking we are used to.12 That Descartesbelieved that post-mortem experience would be diminished in thisfashion even if mental life was enhanced in some other way is suggestedby the Letter to Silhon in which he refers to the “primary, unearned, andcertain awareness” he has of himself, and of the still greater capacity of a
CATHERINE WILSON78
13 Descartes, Letter to Silhon, March or April 1648, AT V: 137-8; CSMK III:
331.
future disembodied mind of “receiving intuitive knowledge from God.”13
Perhaps Descartes meant to stress here only the mind’s adaptation to theintuitive knowledge he so prized.
Regardless of his personal beliefs, Descartes was eager to respondto the criticism that he had not proved the immortality of the soul bymerely showing it to be distinct from the body. To Mersenne’saccusation, he replied, “I admit I cannot refute what you say. Humanreason is inadequate to judge matters that depend on the free will ofGod”. But substances are not observed or known to perish, so the mind“insofar as it can be known by natural philosophy” is immortal (AT VII:153-4).
To Gassendi, he said that Gassendi's advancement of materialisticcounter-hypotheses was “tedious and repetitious” (AT VII: 386). Thiswas fair criticism. Throughout the Objections, Gassendi, rather thanfollowing Descartes's argument, simply pushed his own Epicureanagenda, insisting that Descartes hadn't shown materialism to beincoherent.
To the Sixth Set of Objectors, who quoted Ecclesiastes to him tosuggest that the Bible was somewhat ambiguous on the promise ofeternal life, Descartes said that it was not his job to comment onScriptural passages (AT VII: 428), but he conceded that it was after allonly faith that enabled us to know that the soul will ascend “above” (ATVII: 431).
The reader might think that Descartes was being overly modest inhis Replies and making unnecessary concessions. Didn’t his argument forthe distinctness of mind and body in Mediation Six give strong reasonsfor supposing the soul to be immortal? For, since God could have createdmy mind in such a way that it does not depend on any body, isn’t itreasonable to infer that I can continue to exist when my body crumblesinto dust?
The point that I can continue to exist when my body is no longeran integral thing, however, hardly constitutes an argument for theimmortality of the soul. To interpret it as such, a merely modal “can” hasto be read as the “can do” of achievement, as when I conclude from
MEDITATION SIX 79
looking at my watch that, if I leave now, I can make it to the train stationto catch my train, i.e., I am going to make it, not just that in somepossible world I make my train.
Analogously, trees “can” exist without soil. In some possibleworlds they do, which, if the concepts of “tree” and “soil” wereinterdependent, they could not. But, in fact, trees by and large do dependon soil, and if there were no soil in our world we should have differentsorts of trees or possibly no trees at all. I am not justified in concludingthat, because a tree can exist without soil, the tree in my garden willcontinue to exist if I remove all the soil from its roots. No one can vouchfor the safety of my tree in the absence of soil. And it seems that I cannotbe assured of the safety of my mind in this world in the absence of mybody.
Gassendi made essentially this objection: “real separation isimpossible no matter how much the mind may separate them […]” (ATVII: 323). Descartes’s earlier response to a similar point from Cateruswas that he understood both mind and body so completely as to be surethat there existed a “real distinction” AT VII:121).But even if the mind isnot identical with the body, I cannot infer from this nonidentity that myworld contains immortal immaterial human minds, not only mortalimmaterial ones. If I know that the mind “can” exist without the body, Iknow that in some worlds it does. But that doesn’t given me informationabout this world. Do I have evidence that I am in the sort of world whereminds never perish? Or do I have evidence that I am in the sort of worldwhere they always do?
Descartes seemed to appreciate that immortality did not followfrom distinctness or independence, admitting that he did not in fact sayone word about immortality in the Meditations. (Indeed, if it is possibleto discover truths about the true and immutable nature of trianglewhether or not triangles exist, one might suppose that it is entirelypossible to discover truths about the true and immutable natures of Godand the soul, whether or not there is a God and there are souls.)But hedid advance some further arguments. In his Reply to Mersenne he said:
[T]he final death of the body depends solely on a division or
change of shape. Now we have no convincing evidence or
precedent to suggest that the death or annihilation of a substance
like the mind must result from such a trivial cause as a change in
shape…Indeed, we do not even have any convincing evidence or
CATHERINE WILSON80
precedent to suggest that any substance can perish. And this
entitles us to conclude that the mind, in so far as it can be known
by natural philosophy, is immortal. (AT VII: 153)
A similar argument was introduced into the summary of the Meditationslater placed at the beginning of the work. Descartes stated there that
absolutely all substances […] are by their very nature incorruptible
and cannot ever be reduced to nothing except by God’s denying his
concurrence to them”. He then explained that “if all the accidents
of the mind change so that it has different objects of the
understanding and d ifferent desires and sensations, it does not on
that account become a different mind; whereas a human bo dy loses
its identity merely as a result of a change in the shape of some of
its parts. (AT VII: 14)
Note that distinctness and separateness did not enter into thisaccessory argument for immortality. This argument did not develop thetheme of Meditation Six. Rather, it reduced to this:
My mind is a substance. All substances (as opposed to accidentalconfigurations) are naturally imperishable. So, my mind isimmortal.
Certainly, if I can know that I live in a world in which substances areimperishable and that my mind is a substance, I can conclude that I amimmortal. But how do I know I live in the sort of world in whichsubstances are all imperishable? A substance is capable of independentexistence, but can we not imagine that in some worlds there are somethings capable of independent existence that exist only for an interval?
Descartes meant to contrast organized bodies (including traditionalAristotelian substances) with substantia. An orange, a temple, a humanbody, decays over time and is resolved into its elements. But thecorporeal substance underlying the particles of which all things arecomposed is eternal, or at least imperishable. Descartes did not claim tohave demonstrated the truth of this conservation principle. But supposewe allow that Descartes knew in the 17th century that the entire mass ofcorporeal substance was imperishable and that God, infinite incorporealsubstance, was imperishable too. This might be thought to provide good
MEDITATION SIX 81
inductive evidence - 2 out 3 substances investigated are known, whetherby reason or by faith, to be imperishable - that each individual mentalsubstance is imperishable as well. But if human bodies disintegrate intothe parts of which they are composed after a certain number of years andrecombine to form new objects, why shouldn’t human thoughts andexperiences as well? Why should I suppose that I will remain a coherentbundle of memories, thoughts, dispositions etc?Perhaps they will fallapart, scatter, and recombine to make another personality. Mentalsubstance might be imperishable without the contents of my individualmind being so.
Now, for Descartes, perceptions, thoughts, and memories were notconstituents or parts of mental substances, i.e. of the individual minds,but modes that inhered in mental substance. It seems that Descartesconceived each mind as equivalent to all of extended matter. Extendedmatter can assume various forms without ever being annihilated, and so,in his view, could each mind. This conclusion was is not very favourablefor theology. For (recall the implicit objection Locke will make in theEssay Bk. II Ch. 21 to metaphysical, substance-based vs. experientialconceptions of identity), if each mind is like an entire world that can passinto qualitatively different states while its substance persists, where is thepersonality required for divine reward and punishment?
Perhaps some answer to this query could be given in the form of ahypothesis of mental stability. While the various parts of the universe areconstantly being reshuffled and recombining, giving rise to differentthings and relations, to qualitatively new worlds, minds tend to preservetheir contents. But how do I know that I am a substance anyway, notsome kind of insubstantial thing - a mere res, which is a mode perhaps,and not a substantia; a thinking sort of mode which is imagined asincorporeal?
Descartes gave no argument for the substantiality of the mind. InMeditation Three he asserted, “With regard to the clear and distinctelements in my ideas of corporeal things, it appears that I could haveborrowed some of these from my idea of myself, namely substance,duration, number and anything else of this kind. For example, I think thata stone is a substance, or is a thing capable of existing independently,and I also think that I am a substance” (AT VII: 44). A few lines later,however, he decided that he was a substance. He referred to “the fact thatI am a substance.” But no such fact was established in his text.
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The best reconstruction we can give of Descartes’s gesturetowards an immortality proof is perhaps this:
Mind and body can exist independently: there is no contradictionin supposing that there exists a bodiless mind. Since they can existindependently, and since there is no particular reason why mymind should cease to exist when my body ceases to exist, my mind(invoking something like the principle of sufficient reason) mustcontinue to exist when my body becomes dust.
But now another difficulty looms. Don’t I in fact have a number ofreasons to believe that my mind will cease to exist when my body does? Ihave noticed, for example, that my mind doesn’t work as well (and thisapplies to abstract and nonimagistic thinking insofar as I am capable ofit) when I am very tired or have had a lot of wine to drink.
When that observation was put to him by Gassendi, Descartespretended that it was banal and irrelevant. He insisted that familiarexperiences of mental impairment did not provide evidence that the minddepended for its existence and integrity on the body, but only that thebody could interfere with the optimal functioning of the mind .He saidthat the view that the formation of thoughts is due to the brain was “notbased on any positive argument” but rather on the experience of beingobstructed by the body:
It is just as if someone had had his legs [pointlessly and]
permanently shackled from infancy; he would think that the
shackles were part of his body and that he needed them for walking
(AT VII: 96).
This would be the wrong inference on that person’s part. However, if weobserved that a person had had his legs shackled from infancy, we wouldprobably be justified in concluding that he did need them for walking. If Iwere pointlessly attached to a body from infancy, I might wrongly inferthat I needed it for thinking. But why should I suppose that this bad andarbitrary fate of being pointlessly attached to a body from infancy hasbefallen me? I would have reason to believe that I am safe as a thinking person fromdissolution regardless of what happens to my body if I knew that I was
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14 Aristotle establishes that anger, courage, appetite and sensation generally are
all affections of the complex of soul and body. If thinking is a form of
imagination, he decides, it too requires a body. Memory and love both cease
when the body decays in old age; only thought “as an independent substance
implanted within us” is incapable of being destroyed (De anima, Bk 1: 403a3
ff.).
pointlessly attached to a body and had formed the wrong inference aboutneeding it. I would also have reason to believe that I was safe if I hadgood reason to believe that there was a point to my being temporarilyattached to a body, but only temporarily, i.e., that permanent attachmentwould be pointless. If I have reason to believe that God originallyfashioned me as a creature composed of two temporarily interactingsubstances but that his plans call for their eventual separation, I need notfear for my mind. Unfortunately, Descartes tells us, we have no insightinto God's plans (AT VII: 61).
Compare Descartes’s fecklessness about immortality with theearnestness with which his contemporaries and successors treat thisissue. Spinoza was perhaps mysterious about the connection betweenvirtue and immortality, but immortality was certainly asserted and itsbasis explained. Locke took immortality seriously enough to make theidea of it the basis of his theory of moral motivation. Leibniz took itseriously enough to posit naturally immortal monads in the place ofmaterial atoms. Kant made immortality a required postulate of reason.But Descartes was very little concerned with the hereafter, addressing thetopic only in defensive contexts when he was accused of having said toolittle. Despite his bold announcement to the contrary in his Preface,Descartes did not really have his eye firmly on proving the immortalityof the human soul in a sense useful to theologians. We have to concludethat, on this question, he remained at best close to the Aristotelianposition.14 The main theses of Meditation Six were incompatible with thethesis that we can remember our past deeds, take pleasure in heavenlysurroundings, or suffer the torments of the fires of hell, after death.
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IV
One might think that there is more room for disembodied experience -not just disembodied “thought” - in Descartes’s theory of the mind than Iam allowing. Critics might protest as follows:
Objection 1: Conscious awareness of sensory features, colours,etc. distinguishes men from animals. Immortality alsodistinguishes men from animals. So, if the soul is immortal, itmust, according to Descartes, have conscious experience ofsensory features, colours, etc. Response. This is a nonsequitur. If we knew only that men hadconscious experiences and were immortal, and that animals did notand were not, we could not infer anything about the post-mortemexperiences of men.
Objection 2: Clearly, mechanical organization is insufficient inDescartes’s view for conscious awareness. Since a soul is required,conscious sensory awareness must be a distinctively human traitand will persist.Response. This is again a nonsequitur. A soul may be necessary forfull sensory awareness, but a body is still necessary too, divineintervention excluded. Objection 3. Descartes specifically describes sensory awareness inthe Principles as a form of thought. “As often happens duringsleep, it is possible for me to think I am seeing or walking, thoughmy eyes are closed and I am not moving about; such thoughtsmight even be possible if I had no body at all” (AT VIIIA: 7-8).Soimmortality, if it involves the survival of the mind without thebody, could be perceptually rich and full. Response: Descartes does not state that sensory thoughts mustoccur in disembodied beings. He states that they “might” be“possible”. He has conceded that God could arrange fordisembodied minds to experience; however, this would not be acontinuation of the ordinary Cartesian way of experiencing.
It is worth remarking in this connexion that the thesis thatdisembodied minds would not have sensory experiences and memoriesunless God furnished them with hallucinations is not equivalent to the
MEDITATION SIX 85
15 Baker and Morris (1996: 91-100) claim that Descartes did allow for animal
awareness, though their arguments have not so far enjoyed broad acceptance.
thesis that embodied animals have experiences. A suitably organizedbody, as noted above, seems to be necessary for experience inDescartes’s system, but not sufficient. Yet one wonders whetherDescartes’s moral-intellectual system would have been seriouslydamaged if he had allowed that animals had conscious sensoryexperiences, but that, lacking a rational soul, they were unable to think,and capable only of the most stereotyped and emotion-driven actions.Such a position seems more consistent with his claim that sensations areuseful for the maintenance of life. For why should humans needconscious sensations if animals can get along with unconscious reflexes?Rationality seems to imply consciousness; in reasoning we attend to aninner object. Perhaps the use of language also implies consciousness; ifso, “zombies” could not use language as we do any more than persons ina coma can. But consciousness does not imply rationality and language.Ascribing consciousness to animals would not have necessitatedascribing reason and language-competence to them.
Descartes presumably denied that unensouled animals could haveexperiences like our human experiences not because he thought thatwould have wrongly implied that they possessed rationality andlanguage, but because his aim was to defend a mechanical account oflife. To defend that account, he had to concede there was much thatmatter could not do. He began with an “explanatory gap” – hismechanical theory could explain behaviour, but not language, orrationality, or awareness. He saw that animals need not be ascribedlanguage and rationality. Then he found uses, secular and theological, forthe thesis that animals lack awareness, as well as lacking language andrationality. If they lack awareness, they cannot experience pain, have nomoral standing, and can be treated any old way.
His personal conviction on this latter score may not however havebeen perfectly firm.15 Descartes cited certain observations thatdistinguish men from other animals. The relatively inflexible patterns ofanimal behaviour and animal communication contrast with theresponsiveness to new demands of rational agents with their open-endedsyntactic and semantic capacities. But, Descartes never presented
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behavioural evidence that animals are not conscious, i.e., that being ananimal is like being a person in a coma who nevertheless manages tolive, move, and interact with the world in an unconscious state: a zombie.Indeed, no observational evidence would point clearly to animals beingzombies. Descartes’s lesser certainty about awareness, by contrast withrationality, was perhaps reflected in his twice describing animalexperience as similar to absent-minded human experience. In a Letter toPlempius of 3 October 1637, Descartes said that animals are likeinattentive people who are not concentrating on or thinking about whatthey are doing. They see not "as we do when we are aware that we see,but only as we do when our mind is elsewhere." (AT I: 459-60). In aLetter to the Marquess of Newcastle of 23 November 1646, he says:
It often happens that we walk or eat without thinking at all about
what we are doing; and similarly, without using our reason, we
reject things which are harmful for us, and parry the blows aimed
at us.Indeed, even if we expressly willed not to put our hands in
front of our head when we fall, we could not prevent ourse lves. I
consider also that if we had no thought then we would walk, as the
animals do, without having learnt to. […] In fact, none of our
external actions can show anyone who examines it that our body is
not just a self-moving machine but contains a soul with thoughts.
(AT IV: 570ff.)
It has been observed that animals resemble extremely emotional people.They lack our characteristic inhibitions, our remarkable ability to focuson inner objects and to refrain from overt action; often, we talk andreason rather than acting. In dreams, however, we are more like animals:we are aware, responsive, and emotional, but we do not reason or talkmuch. Why shouldn’t being an animal be something like this? Theaddition of the human soul to a human body, on this view, would notgive us experiences where we had none before, but rather improve outability to ignore the solicitations of the environment and to conceptualizeand verbalize about non-present things.
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16 See Hatfield, 1986. For an explicit defense of Cartesian Platonism, see Menn,
2002.
V Setting all this in context, the Meditations is but one version of a moregeneral phenomenon: the revival of pagan naturalism in the 17th century,a revival encompassing experimentation on animals, the revival ofdescriptive anatomy, a “mechanical” approach to explanation, and adedicated search for remedies to postpone or prevent death. This revivalwas nevertheless conducted for the most part within the constraints andaspirations of Platonic-Christian providentialism and anti-materialism.
Descartes was in some respects a Platonist who believed the worldwas not ethically neutral but good because of its ultimate “creation” - itsradical origination, as Leibniz would say, - by a benevolent andintelligent creator.16 When he wrote in this register, he discusseddisembodied existence, the efficacy of immaterial causes, and thesuperiority of higher incorporeal things to lower material thingsgenerally. But when it came down to particulars, to the formation of thecosmos and plant and animal bodies, and to meteorological andembryological phenomena, Descartes wrote as a Democritean naturalphilosopher. His Discourse on Method ends with a plea for financialsupport for physiological experiments, and the long exposition of themechanical basis for the activity of the heart and the circulation of theblood in Part V is not an irrelevancy but an example of the fruits ofmethodical investigation. When Descartes said in the Preface to hisDescription of the Human Body, “There is no more fruitful exercise thanattempting to know ourselves” he was writing as a Democritean, not as aPlatonist, for he continued: “I believe that we would have been able tofind many very reliable rules, both for curing illness and for preventingit, and even for slowing down the aging process, if only we had spentenough effort getting to know the nature of our body, instead ofattributing to the soul functions which depend solely on the body and onthe disposition of its organs.”(AT X1: 223-4).
To conclude, if Descartes had written a Preface to the Meditationsthat was truthful, faithful to his firmest convictions, and philosophicallyconsistent, the relevant section would have gone something like this:
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17 The function of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God in
Meditation Five canno t be to prove the existence of God; for if Descartes hasn’t
already done this in Meditation Three, his overall argument is in trouble. W hy is
it placed here? Its function may be to show off the excellent results obtained by
I cannot demonstrate the immortality of the human soul, andprobably no philosopher can. Immortality is not logicallyimpossible, but it wouldn’t be what you are probably imagining itto be either. Perception, like sensation and emotion, is a registeringby our minds of occurrences in our nerves and brain. If our mindsendure after death, therefore, as far as the philosopher can tell,they will feel neither pain, nor pleasure, for they will no longerform a composite with our bodies. We will no longer see colours,touch objects, and hear sounds. We will not remember events ofour past lives. We will be numb and inert. Animals will be, as bothAristotle and Lucretius thought, nothing after death, and wehumans will be almost nothing - at most capable of imagelessthought and intellectual memory. Of course, we can hope for morethan this. Perhaps our bodies will be resurrected and reattached toour minds, so that we are restored to awareness of a world. Butthis is a matter of faith and cannot be philosophicallydemonstrated, whereas more important truths such as theexcellence of our minds and bodies can be philosophicallydemonstrated. Be that as it may, we are not mere animals. Ourlanguage and rationality indicate that we are specially favoured byGod. As to whether animals are conscious, I do not know. I avoidspeculative philosophy. But everyone can appreciate that animalscannot carry on a conversation, and I seriously doubt that animalsreason, for I can show how their behaviour is mediated by thebrain to which their sensory organs report, without ascribingreasoning to them.The Fathers of the Church were wrong to scorn the human body asa source of moral corruption and to suggest that it is a shell that wewill happily cast off. We use the cerebral representations it formsfor purposes as exalted as mathematics, and if we could notunderstand and trust proofs about the triangle, how should weunderstand and feel confident about proofs about invisible objectssuch as God?17 The body is sorely tried and tested. Yet it is a well-
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pure conceptual analysis, lending legitimacy to mathematical, and, by extension,
to all Cartesian a priori reasoning.
constructed machine, adapted to a complex world. We shouldtherefore strive to preserve our lives and our health, and to engageour senses with scientific activities of all sorts. In any case, there isnothing to fear about life after death, because you certainly won’tbe able to experience pain. Admire God, who has given you aworld to study, as well as to experience, and a mind equipped withlanguage and reasoning powers, but leave off worrying abouteternal rewards and punishments.
Of course Descartes could not have published such a Preface, not
in France and not under his own name. Yet it was to communicate thisvery different message that he offered, without his heart being in thetask, to prove the immortality of the soul.
